In the spring of 1996, a group of low-income workers in Central Vermont started a group called Central Vermonters For A Livable Wage. In 1998, they officially launched the Vermont Workers' Center (VWC) and opened up an office in Barre.

The first project of the VWC was the Vermont Workers' Rights Hotline. The Hotline receives thousands of calls from Vermonters who concerns and feel they have their rights violated. We learned that the only real way for working people to improve workplace conditions was to get together to form unions to bargain a contract with their employer or demand elected officials change the laws.

The VWC began working with progressive unions and community members to push to support workers who were organizing and also push to raise the minimum wage as part of the Vermonters For a Livable Wage Campaign.

In the Fall of 2001, the Workers' Center affiliated with the national organization called Jobs With Justice. Founded in 1987, JWJ's mission is to improve working people's standard of living, fight for job security, and protect workers' right to organize. There are now over 40 local coalitions of Jobs With Justice across the country. JW is now playing a leading role in the national campaign Caring Across Generations.

In the Summer of 2005, the Workers' Center affiliated with another alliance of grassroots groups called Grassroots Global Justice, which organizes to build an agenda for power for working and poor people, understanding that there are important connections between the local issues we work on and the global context. GGJ sees itself as part of an international movement for global justice.

Over the years, VWC leaders increasingly realized that for many of the problems working people faced the solutions transcended the workplace. One issue that stood out was the healthcare crisis that resulted from an employment based insurance system that treated healthcare as a commodity. Vermont elected leaders for decades had been saying that while they supported universal healthcare, it wasn't politically possible. In 2008, the VWC launched the Healthcare Is A Human Right Campaign to build a strong enough statewide grassroots people's movement to change what is politiclaly possible.

Since 2008, the VWC's membership has grown tremendously across the state as more and more people got involved in the HCHR campaign and wanted to help build a people's movement for real democracy. Over that time universal healthcare went from being not politically possible to becoming a political priority. The passage of Act 48 in 2011, established Vermont as the first state to declare healthcare is a public good and put our state on course to have universal care in the next few years.

But people began to realize that truly making a universal healthcare system work - where healthcare dollars actually go into providing care and the system was accountable to us - meant really redefining the role of government and how public funds are raised and spent. In 2011, the VWC launched Put People First: The People's Budget Campaign to build a grassroots movement for real democracy.